Do tree roots always grow downwards?

This was a question somebody posed in a science forum.

No, though in general they do sometimes under the ground they come to obstacles, such as stones. Then they can be forced to grow up and over or around the object. You also get hairs that grow out of roots as the root thickens these become smaller roots or rootlettes that can start of heading upwards through the soil before turning as they grow down.

Dear Ahad,
Do you remember the baobab trees that grew on the planet of the Little Prince? I remember the drawings in the book. The baobabs grew over the whole planet. It would depend on where one stood to know it the roots were growing down or sideways or up! hahah. I imagine it is kind of sheep in the cage theory. Just what your perspective is determines up, down or sideways.

Thehairymob is correct. I know a bit about trees. The really big oak trees that grow here send their roots out sideways for the most part, and hold on to the earth with many strong roots. Some go down a few feet, but mostly all the roots are in the first three or four feet of soil.

A Big oak drinks 250 gallons of water a day. It transpires that much, too. So, rain comes and drops 250 gallons of water. It is a lovely cycle.

Some small trees have a long taproot. If they are planted on land that has a hard pan under the first two feet, they will be stunted all their life. They cannot penetrate it.

When I grew trees in pots, the roots could not escape the pot and grew in circles and tied themselves in knots. That is true of the bald cypress. Ah, but the pot makers made a pot for that and had it shaped like a clover leaf to fool the roots into making a downward turn and growing out the holes in the bottom of the pot. It did not work very well.

I had a lot of sweet gum trees and red maples growing in pots. They kept blowing over in the wind so I lined them up against my barbed wire fence and tied them up. There they sat for several years. They grew through the pot's holes and put down roots into the ground. They grew and grew and now they are a solid fence of trees along that wire two hundred feet long. They are 30 feet tall.

If you ever go to China and look at the ground, you will see thier roots just breaking the surface.

Love,
Betty

I grew up in an area where bayous and cypress trees were a predominant form of plant life. As I understand it, the knees are a part of the root that grows upward.






Ann

Billy is right that there are some trees that have a lot of surface roots going sideways, especially if there is stone or hard granite directly beneath the trunk.

Betty,
I'm afraid I missed the fantasy of baobab trees that grew on the planet of the Little Prince.
Ann, that's a lovely picture, reminds me of the mangrove forests with trees standing in water like that.

I love all kinds of trees. I planted trees since I was four or five. One variety I planted in my village in Bangladesh next to our house was a jackfruit tree:



Many years after I came to live in England, my uncle wrote a letter to my mum saying my jackfruit tree had grown to a fruiting size, and that it had produced a very fine crop of its first jackfruits. They were all eating them and thinking of me!

Now I have a question for anyone here who has tried to grow bonsai trees. I want to learn, so please enlighten me.

I tried to grow one but when I moved it died. One strange sounding thing I learned is you don't just trim the branches but the roots as well. The roots need to be trimmed back every two or three years. Use the light, if you have it on a window sill, to help shape it as it will grow towards the light.

Does lightning move from the sky downward or from the ground upward?

Dick,
that's a trick question. You get your favorite icon for that.

Quote :

Does lightning move from the sky downward or from the ground upward?

Actually it's kinda both...

The lightning bolt we see is from the ground upward, but before that
occurs an ionized pathway develops from the cloud down to the earth
(invisible to the naked eye). This now very conductive pathway becomes
available to the negative electrons of the earth.

When the difference of potential overcomes the resistance of the
ionized pathway between the ground and the cloud, a "bolt" of lightning
carries the negative electrons to the cloud - and equalizes the
difference.

Electron flow is always from negative to positive.

You just never know what you're going to learn on this messageboard!

Long, long ago, when I lived in California, I had a little redwood tree that needed to be pruned on top and in the roots to make it a bonsai tree. It had to be wrapped in wire to get the branches to grow where I wanted them. But that's all I remember. I left it with a "friend" to water while I went away for a week, and she killed it! I probably would've killed myself eventually.

Helen, I hope you wouldn't have killed yourself!!! I'm kidding... Funny how one little ommitted word can change an entire sentence.

Oops! Thanks for noticing, Merri! No, it didn't mean that much to me. Ha!!

Yea! I'm so glad! hee hee

I'm still giggling, too!

Helen,
I might have to kill myself if my bonsai project fails!

I have a tropical fruit tree that I raised from seed, that's about 2 years old. It's indoors in a container, since the slightest amount of frost in the British winter will damage it irrepairably.

I had no idea if it would survive indoors on a sunny windowsill, but it seems to be thriving so far. Now I have to keep pruning it back to make sure it is 'bonsaied' gradually into a dwarf sized tree.
I have totally no idea about bonsai-ing anything. The closest I had ever been to a bonsai was in the gardening store. So... some exciting times ahead!

I like to know if a bonsai tree would flower and fruit? If so, then would its fruits be dwarfed in proportion to its size I wonder? Maybe they would....

... find out here:

http://www.bonsaisite.com/intro1.html

Ah, easy to forget it's all on the internet. Thank you Shelagh!

And here's a magnolia bonsai tree in flower on that same site:







Back on the topic of "Do tree roots always grow downwards?"

The reason why they mostly grow downwards deep into the earth has to be to seek out nutrients and water in the soil. Then there is also the pull of gravity that makes them go downwards and not up.

In some microgravity research experiments (or virtual zero-G) conducted on the International Space Station:



They found that plant roots go into a kind of spiralling motion, since there's no such thing as 'up' or 'down' in zero-gravity.

What a great bonsai site, Shelagh!

Abdul,
The tree isn't worth your life either, even if you've raised it from seed! I do think that the fruit on it would be full size. That magnolia is really beautiful!

Plant roots in a spiraling motion would be quite the thing to see!

That magnolia bonsai tree is gorgeous!!

I thought a bonsai was an attack staged by the Japanese army.

If you check out the site Shelagh gave a link to, you can see a crab-apple bonsai tree with full sized fruit.

This is a link to the crabapple:

http://bonsaisite.com/m6.html

Nice. I could get through those crab apples in no time. I just add a dash of salt and I'm squinting from their sourness!!

Dick, first time I heard the word 'bonsai', I thought it was the same as 'kamikaze'?!


Seriously though, there is another scenario (before somebody says "Here we go again..." this is just to illustrate the point of tree roots growing in the direction of gravity, which may not necessarily always be downwards), consider filling a small bucket with water and whirling it around on the end of a piece of rope, like so:






Even though the bucket may be tilted at 90 degrees, or even at 180 degrees, if she was whirling it above her head, the water will not spill out.

Try it out! It's a great experiment!